Getting Talent Identification Back On The Field

The AFL Combine – Does it tell us anything about a player’s talent?

By Dr Jade Haycraft

Identifying the next superstar of any game is hot property. As such, outside of the game itself, National Drafts are one of the most watched and publicised events in sports like the National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL). The Australian Football League (AFL) is no different, hosting an annual Draft Combine for the purpose of assessing physical fitness and technical skills in the hope of identifying a diamond among the (not so) rough.

Given its popularity among both the AFL community and general public, a myriad of research assessing ability of physical fitness tests to differentiate talented players across the AFL participation pathways has been conducted. What the majority of this work shows us is that the Combine test battery can differentiate junior players in local club systems, but also that physical fitness testing is not that great at differentiating players within the talent pathway itself. Therefore, how well can the tests used in the National Combine predict the success of a player in the AFL?

We recently set out to answer this question in a paper published in PLOS ONE. What we found was that a player’s performance in the Draft Combine tests, draft selection number, and playing position were all pretty bad at explaining how good their career would turn out to be, when analysed over a 17-year period. This told us a major thing, and that is that talent is dynamic, and because of this, static tests like those used in the National Combine, might not be that great at helping us predict how good a player’s career will be.

Talent is dynamic

Now, what is pretty interesting is that while the National Combine provides some varied information on a players physical and technical capabilities, AFL talent selectors don’t really find the tests to be that beneficial in their decision making when it comes to drafting the next best thing. This is understandable, as sporting performance is the result of the dynamic and complex relationships formed between a range of things, like an athlete’s physical capability, coupled with the task requirements, and the context in which the task is to be done.

So, when we take stock of the range of things that could contribute to talented actions in sport, it becomes clear that isolated physical fitness tests don’t provide us with enough information regarding a player’s capability to maintain an elite AFL career. So, what can be done to ensure Combine testing provides robust assessments of a player’s potential?

We need to take it out of the lab and onto the footy field

Given the continued evolution and accessibility of player tracking technology, a player’s physical output can be fairly easily captured during actual matches. While this doesn’t provide information on the players skill involvements, it does shift the physical testing away from isolated off-field physical fitness assessments, to on-field game-specific assessments. So, using this as a guide, could we take skill assessments one step further and combine physical outputs and skill testing within the same assessment protocol?

Small-sided game (SSG) assessments might be the answer to this question, allowing the integration of both physical and technical assessments in a game environment. Work from our group at Victoria University has investigated this very topic in a paper published in the Journal of Sport Sciences. They found that performance in a SSG was able to differentiate 97% of players classified as novice or sub-elite between the U13 and U18 levels, showing considerable promise for the inclusion of SSGs in the National Combine.

Yep, there is still more work to be done, but the move toward more assessments embedded into ‘real’ game contexts is clearly a step in the right direction. Not only are they easy to administer, they offer us a decent insight into how players may go about uniquely managing the dynamic nature of game-play in a relatively easy way.